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Looking at the list of other projects that have been labelled "high-priority", I think it means that it will never be done.

Agreed. The FSF should either back the projects they label as 'high-priority' with financial and/or developer resources or stop labeling projects as such. Right now they are only making themselves look bad.

Stupid vendor-specific non-standard extensions!

Originally Posted by elanthis

There will be a ton of device-specific tweaks, but then that's the same for Intel HD audio chipsets or SATA controllers or even USB HID devices. Nobody follows the damn specs precisely, so you always need drivers with a ton of tweaks.

And that's exactly why we're so screwed, especially considering that these morons completely lack the concept of at least bothering to document how and where they intentionally screwed up.

Refusing to buy nvidia cards probably hurts open source development more than it helps. If you had one, you could at least help out the nouveau developers by testing the nouveau driver.

Yeah right. Unlike a reverse engineered PowerVR driver the Nouveau driver is largely a waste of time since you have an option to buy a system with an integrated AMD/ATI or Intel GPU or buy a dedicated AMD/ATI GPU, you know, companies that actually spend money and dev time on OSS drivers for their hardware unlike Nvidia that just put out a gimmick and a pittance for OSS drivers.

Now though, for the vast majority of ARM based consumer products there is no option other then a PowerVR GPU and you can't add in your own GPU since none of the hardware comes with an expansion slot. Sure, Nvidia is making inroads into the ARM market with their Tegra line of SoCs, but the market is still dominated by Texas Instruments.

Yeah, I know Qualcomm's Snapdragon series SoCs use the ATI Imageon derived Adreno, but from what I've seen there’s no OSS driver being developed for it. Yes, there’s also VIA/S3's ARM chips like the WM8505, which has no good Linux driver, nor is it fast enough anyone to actually want something based around it outside of disposable mini laptops for black hatting.

Oh, so now it's a priority? Where have they been for the past...oooh, four years now?

When i was the only guy (apart from twini) doing something as useless as modesetting, i never heard of the FSF.
When we were doing RadeonHD and were freeing ATI, pushing them to get docs out and writing a driver, we never heard of the FSF.
When i wrote up the code to get a unichrome bootstrapped for a full VGA text mode, and later on a full graphical mode, i never heard of the FSF.

And now there is some guy out there, who REed a part of a different chip, and the FSF mistakenly thinks this guy does PVR stuff, now they make noise?

The FSF has been irrelevant for a long time. Aside from the GPLv3, they haven't done anything noteworthy since... GPLv2. Even their flagship software project, GCC, is starting to fall into irrelevancy as just about everyone interested in compilers is running in the opposite direction towards codebases that don't look like they were written by LISP programmers trapped in C programmers' bodies.

The amount of pure GNU software running on most Linux desktops is very small in comparison to the total amount of software running on them. The amount of pure GNU software running on the Linux mobile devices (which vastly outnumber the number of desktops around, Linux or otherwise) is infinitesimal.

I for one look forward to desktop-level replacements for glibc and coreutils, which will basically boot out GNU of the Linux OS ecosystem and let them rot where they belong with their pure-GPL HURD OS that still doesn't work 20 years after it was conceived.

Granted, I also look forward to just about all (L)GPL-licensed software being replaced with variants that value user experience over developer lazine^Wfreedom, so I'm probably already fairly biased against the FSF.

Yeah right. Unlike a reverse engineered PowerVR driver the Nouveau driver is largely a waste of time since you have an option to buy a system with an integrated AMD/ATI or Intel GPU or buy a dedicated AMD/ATI GPU, you know, companies that actually spend money and dev time on OSS drivers for their hardware unlike Nvidia that just put out a gimmick and a pittance for OSS drivers.

Now though, for the vast majority of ARM based consumer products there is no option other then a PowerVR GPU and you can't add in your own GPU since none of the hardware comes with an expansion slot. Sure, Nvidia is making inroads into the ARM market with their Tegra line of SoCs, but the market is still dominated by Texas Instruments.

Yeah, I know Qualcomm's Snapdragon series SoCs use the ATI Imageon derived Adreno, but from what I've seen there’s no OSS driver being developed for it. Yes, there’s also VIA/S3's ARM chips like the WM8505, which has no good Linux driver, nor is it fast enough anyone to actually want something based around it outside of disposable mini laptops for black hatting.